German philosopher Friedrick Nietzsche famously announced the death of the Christian God in his 1882 work The Gay Science. In this video, I analyze aphorism 125, “The Madman”, to reveal all the hidden meanings behind Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. For Nietzsche, the most significant development is the creation of a new type of nihilism, theoretical nihilism. What happens to truth, knowledge, morality, society when God dies?
Citations:
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983. Buy here.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1974. Buy here.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by Walter Kaufman, The Viking Press, 1966. Buy here.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. Translated by Reginald John Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 2003. Buy here.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1989. Buy here.
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God is dead!
God remains dead!
And we have killed him! You and I!
The Gay Science. (a. 125)
These are the words of German philosopher Friedrick Nietzsche in his 1882 work The Gay Science.
In aphorism 125, Nietzsche has a madman say these words. But, what could a madman know? What is he trying to tell us through rambunctious ramblings? Obviously, the belief in a God is still alive, both during Nietzsche’s time and today. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three primary monotheistic religions of the West, continue to exist with literally billions of adherents. So, how exactly could God not only be dead, but also a murder victim?
This all depends on what one means by God. The monotheistic God of Christianity & Islam is the uncreated creator, the unmoved first mover. This God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent: an omni-God. God is not just the ultimate cause but also the ultimate goal. Let’s just say, he gets around. He is the ens perfectim, the ultimate Good, so one’s distance from God correlates to their own individual goodness or lack thereof. God is the ultimate value, from which all other values spring from, and unlike those pesky contingent worldly values, God’s values are eternally True, aeternitas veritas. It is the nunc stans, the abiding and remaining, that can always be referred to or used as the ground for deeds and thoughts.
So, if God is this freakin amazing, how could He be murdered, by mere mortals at that?
Nietzsche himself was an avowed atheist, only increasing the confusion of stating a deity you don’t believe in is dead. For Nietzsche, the death of the Christian omni-God marks the creation of a new type of nihilism, or a willing towards nothingness. This is a willing to the nihil, the nothing. A type of willing and believing which is profoundly anti-life. Nihilism is anti-life because it doesn’t affirm life; and, the most fundamental aspect of life for Nietzsche is the will to power, Wille zur Macht. “Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but – thus I teach you – will to power” (Z 115). Nihilism perpetrates an end for humanity, either in this life or the next. It says there is nothing left to do, nothing left to create, there is only reactive, sullen life to live. This is the antithesis of the will to power. The will to power always wants more will, always strives to surpass itself. If something does not will, it is not alive. And this resistance to not-willing is what makes nihilism possible, because the will would rather will towards a nothingness, than not will at all.
To be clear, Nietzsche isn’t advocating the reincarnation of God as the supreme value (been there; done that). Christianity teaches us to suppress our inner desires, the impure material world, in favor of an Eternally divine afterlife (one which we have no access too while alive and cannot, therefore, prove its existence). Christianity is just a different form of nihilism, where believers will their existence towards a nothingness (God, the afterlife, values above and beyond life). Religion devalues or depreciates life in the name of allegedly higher values. The nihilism that comes from religion was specifically created to prevent the nihilism of modernity. “It is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism that forces whole millennia to bury their teeth in and cling to a religious interpenetration of existence.” (BGE 59) Now, that god is dead, the madman says: “all who are born after, belong to a higher history than any history hitherto.” (GS a125)
It’s worth noting that the Madman’s audience is not a crowd of religious zealots, but mainly a crowd of atheists and nonbelievers. Nietzsche says, “As there were many people who did not believe in God, the Madman caused a great deal of amusement.” (GS a 125)
These people long ago forsook God, whether by conquering the circumference of the horizon, or by detaching both the Earth & Sun from the center of the universe. The madman is addressing modernity, the enlightenment. It is for this reason the Madman’s listeners laugh at him and express confusion.
Nietzsche describes God generally as “the name for the realm of Ideas and ideals” (Heidegger 61) and specifically as “the last, thinnest, emptiest [concept] … placed as the first, as cause in itself, as an ens realissimum (or the realest being).” (TI 47). The God referred to is not an entity of any kind described above as an omni-God (not an actual being), but is precisely a value created by humanity. God was the ultimate omni-value that was both the alpha (means) and omega (ends) of all things.
The Madman states that even though God is dead, the deed itself has yet to “reach men’s ears… deeds need time, even after they are done to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the farthest star—and yet they have done it!” (GS 125) We should point out that many of the primary figures of the early enlightenment were all deeply religious, and strongly believed in God. Thinkers like Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley, Gottfried Leibniz, etc. all thought their discoveries were ultimately created by an omni-God, and they were using a methodology given to them by God specifically to understand His universe. Yet, their methodology was a seismic shift from the Catholic Scholasticism of the medieval period, where the authority & existence of God was proven through belief and obedience. With thinkers like Bacon & Descartes, proof of God’s value could be proven by any individual through reason & intuition alone, through one’s own faculties. The latter relied on the authority of the intellect, while the former relied on the authority of senses. Either way, the world is knowable, its mysteries can be discovered; we no longer need to rely on church dogma to explain the unknown, we now have our own lanterns to light our way.
Yet, by the 18th and 19th century, this critical methodology had led many enlightenment figures to increasingly secular philosophies like Deism (the belief in an uncaring and uninvolved deity) (Voltaire, Diderot, many of the American Founding fathers) or Atheism (the belief there is no deity) (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche). It is the Deists that maintained God as a mere first cause that is the cause of all things, or as Nietzsche describes, as the the thinnest, emptiest concept, a mere causa sui perpetrated as ens realissimum (the most real being)(TI 47).
The atheists, on the other hand, have already stabbed God right in His genitals. Despite earlier thinkers attempts to “light lanterns” to reveal the hidden knowledge of God, acts like “detaching the Earth from its sun”, “drinking up the sea,” and “wiping away the horizon” undermined the value of God as the ultimate value. It’s these Deists, and more importantly, the atheists, the madman addresses.
What happens when “the holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed” is no longer the foundation for existence, knowledge, and society? The realization that there are no transcendent values. To be transcendent means to be beyond our grasp. That which is transcendent is above us in authority, and it is eternally true. When we talk about ideals, our goal is some transcendent value that we strive for despite it being by definition beyond us. But, without transcendent values, we get the feeling that nothing has any meaning and that everything is the same. “Is there still an above & a below?” the Madman asks.
Nietzsche says it more directly in his book Twilight of the Idols:
“What alone can our teaching be? – That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself … No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain an ‘ideal of man’ or an ‘ideal of happiness’ or an ‘ideal of morality’ – it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality purpose is lacking…” (TI pg 65)
Basically, there is nothing out there that gives a fuck. We created the concept purpose and because we’ve applied it to God, a being that for the purposes of this video we’ll all agree doesn’t exist, we find purpose lacking. And with the death of God, this lack of purpose is all the more blatant.
The madman questions whether the world has become darker, colder, more empty after God’s death. Humanity, which clung so hard to this highest conception called God, now plunges continually in all directions as if straying through an infinite nothingness (GS a. 125). With the Death of God comes the death of Christian morality and the value it gave to life. Now, humanity has lost all values it once clung too. Nietzsche says in the book Beyond Good & Evil, “didn’t one have to sacrifice God himself and, from cruelty against oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To sacrifice god for nothing” (BGE a 55.) All values have lost meaning and seem to point us towards nothing. There is no objective morality: no good or evil. If all values are equally nothing, if there is perfect equality in society (like so many humanists and socialists seemed to desire according to Nietzsche’s own opinion), then there is nothing to overcome. Nietzsche calls this a modern form of nihilism or theoretical nihilism.
The Death of God is the death of the highest concept, the transcendental concept. The madman asks, “shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it” (GS a. 125). When humans becomes God, they attempt to become the transcendental ground for the world. What then happens? Humanity becomes an end unto itself.
Here, Nietzsche points his hammer at thinkers like Descartes and Kant that prioritized the metaphysics of a transcendental, whole, complete ego. The ego of the subject becomes the primary metaphysical principle and lens through which eternally True knowledge could be viewed. At the same time, 18th-19th century thinkers increasingly saw their era as the pinnacle of human history, there’s nothing left to do; we’re here at the final and perfect conclusion. For instance, before the discoveries of Albert Einstein and Quantum Mechanics, many physicists believed there was nothing left to learn besides increasingly accurate & precise measurements.
This thought, humanity as the end, means everything must spring from humanity. This is the ultimate consequence of Modernity and nihilism: if humanity is an end there is nothing to be overcome.
Humanity then imagines the world as a living being, a machine, or uniform everywhere. Descartes believed all living things were essentially machines, even our own bodies which was separated from our egos. Like the Biblical Adam of Genesis who names all of God’s creations, 18th century biologist Carl Linnaeus conquered the names of all animals through his taxonomic nets, neatly organizing all life into its proper place. Linnaeus also believed that all the species of life that currently existed were permanent and had remained unchanged since the beginning of life. Kant, who was super fucking racist, was against race mixing because he believed nature had already reached its teleological perfection, with the races separated. Because one could only find different races located on different continents with drastically different climates, Kant presupposed that nature had intended a differentiation of races up to this extent. Finally, Thinkers like Kant, Hegel and Marx all believed there was a teleology or purpose to the world. They postulated meta-narratives on the end goal of human civilization. Nietzsche warns us to be on our guard against such thoughts because they presuppose an end, a telos, a grand design or meta-narrative which again prevents overcoming (GS a. 109).
Despite the good and Godly intentions of the early figures of modernity, in murdering God and all other worlds, we were left with just the world of appearances which we exist in… but, after over 2500 years of degrading the sensual for the spiritual (from Plato to Christianity to the modernity with the rationalists and idealists) it is a world of mere appearances. We can never truly be sure, for there is no objective truth. The death of transcendent values leaves us with no north star to the point the Madman wonders if we should even use the lanterns given to us by modernity, “shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning?” (GS 125) These lanterns don’t reveal anything anymore; the reveal only nothing. The madman ultimately throws his own lantern on the ground extinguishing it.
The Madman asks us if we cannot smell the divine putrefaction of the divine corpse. “For even Gods putrefy.” (GS a 125) Despite being dead, the stench of God lingers evermore. Modernity is the will to the thinkability of all beings. In the absence of God, modernity still maintains the necessities grounded in a deity through the creation of “natural laws”, natural order, belief in intelligent design, morality and so on. Nietzsche doesn’t believe there is a natural order to the world; that these beliefs are holdovers from the Christian God that continue to putrefy in modern sciences. Modernity seeks to bend the world around itself, to create the kind of world which humanity can kneel too (Z 113). The modern person kneels to this world and believes it is an escape from the suffering of life. They are not overcoming life; they are acquiescing to it.
Kant legit admits he can’t prove through reason alone whether god exists or not, but still just throws Him into his philosophy, just cause, you know, causa sui.
The nihilism of modernity reduced all of humanity’s values and beliefs to nill. Now, humanity equates all things as equally nothing and does not strive to overcome anything. The words of Nietzsche, “The general character of the world… is to all eternity chaos; not by the absence of necessity, but in the sense of the absence of order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic humanities are called” (GS a. 109). There is a necessity to the cosmos; but, it is a chaotic necessity, a necessity of differences that rejects order, structure, essences, anything eternal or certain, and so on and so forth. A necessity that necessitates overcoming as the only real goal of existence. Differences must necessarily attempt to overcome themselves. Differences that don’t overcome themselves, don’t exist.
Nietzsche says the death of God replaces one form of nihilism with another. This new form of nihilism is the realization of the necessity of chaos, and the deep pessimism that comes with it. It is only here that theoretical forms of nihilism develop where people literally believe in nothing.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze says of modern nihilism that it “is no longer the devaluation of life in the name of higher values but rather the devaluation of higher values themselves.” (Deleuze 148) With God dead & buried,the Good and Truth that rested in God is now lost. If the greatest value ever created can be overturned, then all such values can be ad infinitum. All of our successive highest values—the enlightenment, humanism, utopias—are just as easily dispatched. Our values seem fated towards perpetual nothingness.
With all things Nietzsche, a perspectival methodology is necessary to decipher all the meanings behind his words. One of the things that makes Nietzsche such an incredible thinker is his ability to write things polysemically, with multiple meanings.
Let’s finish off the earlier quote from Twillight of the Idols where Nietzsche stresses there is no purpose for us to rely on. He says this not pessimistically like a pessimistic nihilist would but optimistically:
“One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…. But nothing exists apart from the whole! – That no one is any longer made accountable, that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced back to a causa prima, that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as ‘spirit’, this alone is the great liberation – thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored…. The concept ‘God’ has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence…. We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world.” (TI pg 65)
Contrary to his contemporaries’ behaviors, the death of God for Nietzsche is a profoundly liberating event. Yes, there are no transcendent values, no eternal truths, but those things prevented humanity from affirming life and existence. Humanity has the opportunity to create its own values as it sees fit, specifically values that continuously overcome chaos, thereby affirming life. The Madman says, “I have come too early; I am not at the right time.” The realization of the liberation from God, a momentous occasion with the power of lightning & thunder, has still not reached most of humanity’s ears. And, when it does, Nietzsche hopes it will be heard with the ears of a free spirit.
For Nietzsche, there are actually many deaths of God and Gods that he speaks of throughout his work. Nietzsche performs a genealogy of the different Gods societies have constructed so they would have something to serve and give them order. There are the deaths of many gods—polytheism in general—the death of National Gods like the God of the Old Testament. The Madman speaks of the death of the Christian God (or any monotheistic omni-God), but the story of the Madman mainly focuses on how the death effects humanity: specifically the creation of modern or theoretical nihilism.
